Since my Cube could not run Leopard, and I did not have any other Macs, I was unable to delve into Leopard right away. Apple NL was kind enough to fix this problem for us, by generously loaning me a brand new MacBook with Leopard installed so I could review it for OSNews. Read on for the findings.

I didn't make against against HTML formatting, just its use in e-mail.

(FWIW, I make my living as a web developer, so making against HTML as a whole would be somewhat ridiculous).

How is e-mail different from any other form of written communication? Why, in your opinion, should it be allowed to use formatting on web pages, in printed magazines, newspapers, books, postcards, letters -- but not in e-mails?

How is e-mail different from any other form of written communication? Why, in your opinion, should it be allowed to use formatting on web pages, in printed magazines, newspapers, books, postcards, letters -- but not in e-mails?

Do you really not understand the fundamental difference in model? Just ]think about it.

A good proportion (possibly the vast majority, indeed) of e-mail is unsolicited: granted, there might be a relationship between the sender and recipient, but that doesn't necessarily extend any further than “potential client” and “potential supplier”.

With web pages, you choose to navigate to a site. If you don't like it, you generally don't go back. People like my colleagues are paid a reasonable amount of money to ensure that most people won't fall into that category. Moreover, most browsers offer the ability to override styling and presentation of a properly-written site if you either have a preference for doing as much, or if you have a medical condition that requires it. No such preferences exist in most e-mail clients.

Personal letters—who cares, really? Just the recipient. Business letters—go back several posts in this thread and I've already answered that.

If POP and IMAP servers commonly had the ability for clients to request that only the plain text part of a multipart/alternative message be sent when the message body is downloaded, and mail clients generally had the ability to allow users to state that they prefer plain text over HTML formatted versions, it would be fine. But most don't.

Moreover, HTML e-mail has quite possibly done far more harm than good: the edge cases of HTML e-mail being legitimately used are just that, on balance; the rest are a horror of horrendous formatting (16pt magenta Comic Sans on whatever background colour you happen to have) or attempted exploits.

E-mail doesn't work like any of the things you mentioned, because they're all “published” and you choose to view them (and when, and how). E-mail isn't like that. Somebody sends you an e-mail, you read it. E-mail clients send crappy bloated HTML, and invariably the same clients (and servers) don't give you much in the way of an option to not receive it (it's one reason I used to use mutt for reading all of my e-mail in preference to a graphical client—using a client that couldn't support HTML e-mail but was still powerful was about the only way to not receive it without writing a mail filter to strip the HTML parts out, and even then I still received it, I just couldn't view it).